When software dies

So we're kind of stuck here. Our biology department uses a nice little program called the Genetics Construction Kit what allows students to try and determine the inheritance pattern for various traits in a virtual lab full of flies. You pick two flies with specific traits out of vials, mate them and see the pattern of what comes out. Repeat with some other flies and you can build up a case for understanding the underlying genetics of the system. It's a slick little program and the bio department has built a bunch of labs around it.

It was also written for the Mac Plus. You know, the little all-in-one machine with a 9" screen and a floppy drive that was all the rage in about 1987? It's never been significantly updated, and runs on a bunch of old Mac laptops that run OSX 10.3. That's the last version of OSX that will run GCK- newer versions of MacOSX don't have the OS9 compatibility mode anymore.

So what now? We can keep trying to use the old Mac laptops, but as with any computer their lifespan is finite- they're five years old now. We could try and replace it with something else, but the closest thing I've been able to find is the Virtual Genetics Lab. This is a Java based version with some changes in the types of experiments that can be done. VGL adds the ability to do both XX/XY and ZZ/ZW sex linking as well as 3 allele problems involving circulal or heirarchical dominance. Too bad the bio department doesn't care about that but instead uses the bits they removed- multiple trait problems and codominance-based systems.

We could try to keep the old GCK running using Windows emulators but they have significant limitations- you can't print, can't cut&paste, etc. It still ties us to an aging program that frankly, really shows how far we've come in UI design since 1988, and we're left with additional support questions- does the emulator run on Vista? We could try to roll one ourselves, but this is a significant amount of work and then we have to support it. We can simply give up and redo the labs to use VGL, but then the students lose out. We can lobby the publishers, but according to folks in the department biology profs have been doing this for years with no success. There really aren't any good options- I suspect we might try for rolling one ourselves. (Hey, I like to tinker...)

Ugh.

Coolest picture you'll see this year

Absolutely nothing to do with instructional tech, but just amazingly cool. How you manage to get a satellite hundreds of millions of miles away to get a photo of a tiny, very fast moving object with a highly uncertain position from a couple of hundred miles away, all without any real time guidance since Mars->Earth->Mars round trip radio time is well over 20 minutes is just beyond me...

More free courses online

It looks like some Indian universities are following along in the style of MIT's Open Courseware by placing lecture videos up on Youtube. Another project like this is great news however you look at it- the world can always use more education, especially for people who otherwise might have a hard time finding it. Couple this with something like the OLPC project (assuming they can ever get Flash video to run on one) and you have a way for people who might never have access to any form of higher ed to at least begin to learn a bit.

I'll be very interested to see how this works with copyright- having been to a bunch of the MIT talks at various conferences, the folks running OCW will admit that copyright is one of their biggest hassles- they have to clear every image, bit of video, etc. For some image heavy courses such as architecture, this means 900+ clearances for a single course. Since the universities are broadcasting their own lectures rather than putting up all of the course materials, much of this is avoided, but I suspect that a) copyrighted stuff will sneak in and b) that nobody anywhere will care.

Portals and the LMS continued

So, since I'm actually hosting a roundtable on this, where do they intersect anyway?

To be honest, I really haven't seen it done well even in the all-in-one products. Sure, you get single sign on and it all looks the same, but I managed to hack that into Dokeos and Academus in about an hour. So where could (or should) they leverage each other?

1) Content management. Right now things get stuffed onto the LMS from a network drive somewhere, but there's no real thought put into content reuse, sharing and the like. Why not have the ability to upload a syllabus to the LMS and have it automatically included in a list of syllabi for current courses on the portal that the provost can browse. (Or students- I've never understood the reluctance of various faculty to publicize their syllabi.) Why can't announcements posted on the portal appear on LMS calendars if the professor wants?

2) In a similar vein, is the campus portal being used for social networking: everything from the campus events calendar to surveys to blogs to full-on networking stuff exists in most portals. Much of this can be leveraged within the LMS as well, and most of them have similar tools built into them. Why can't you just have a single interface for a survey or a blog. Of course, this assumes your students actually use the social functions in your portal and just don't go to Facebook instead.

3) Library integration. This is one area I haven't seen done well anywhere. Book searches, reserves, online journals and all the rest could be built directly into the portal+LMS combo. A single link from a course to the electronic reserves (with no login) is a huge plus.

4) Data aggregation. One area where a portal home page can really help is a "Here's everything you need today" list. Let users customize the data that appears- you can get all the course assignments and tests/quizzes, the lacrosse schedule, the dining hall menu and a pull of any clubs you might be interested in into a single space. This can also be useful for campus-wide non-critical announcements such as our upcoming campus power outage.

5) Curriculum and advising integration. If you're at a school with a somewhat odd general education program, having a degree audit system in the portal coupled to course information in the LMS could work very well. We get petitions here from students asking to exempt from a requirement or count a course for some thing that it's not explicitily listed for, but with the backing of LMS assets like syllabi for the relevant courses advising a student would become a lot easier.

So, where else can we go that's beyond my limited imagination?

So, how far do you outsource?

Back at my old job I had a server that was devoted to instructional tech- the LMS (Dokeos) ran on it and I also added a bunch of custom apps, mostly written in PHP/MySQL with an occasional bit of Flash thrown in. It was a handy place to host stuff like a Wiki that didn't really need a dedicated home as well as a place to experiment in.

I haven't had that at GBurg and I've sort of missed it. Where can I put little one-off apps, host a wiki, etc? (The Wiki in our LMS, Angel, is not exactly a biug win) But as time's gone on, I've begun to wonder if it's really necessary. Other people are happy to host stuff, and perhaps we really don't need to do much of anything much anymore.

After all, this Blog is hosted: I'm not using the blog tools in our LMS or installing a blog on a server. I ran a survey tool on a machine at my old job: when the company decided to stop free educational licensing I dumped it for an open source product, still hosted. Yet SurveyMonkey is just as good, works for a quick, small survey and if you really need a lot of stuff, it's cheaper than hosting a product yourself. We don't have a good Wiki on campus, but I just pointed a professor at Wikidot for a project they want to use. I could even outsource the entire development environment since I just got an invite to Google App Engine.

I'm not sure I'd want to host anything needing serious security- I've had people do surveys that fell squarely under HIPPA- but for a generic one off it's not so bad. I could worry about losing the company that runs the outsourced server, but in reality that's no worse than when we lost the survey tool at my old job: we still had to migrate all of the data anyway.

So how far do you go?

Plug for the Portal 2008 conference

In case I do actually have a reader or two, I'll throw in an ad for the 2008 Gettysburg Portal Conference which is coming up this June. It's a small conference focused around using portals in higher ed with a minimum of corporate involvement. (They can host talks, but only with a school) The main theme is measurement and assessment, but there's also going to be a fair amount of learning management system (LMS) and portal integration. I'll be doing a roundtable on "The Portal and the LMS: Ships Passing in the Night?"

You'll also get to see the hilarity of us trying to run the conference during a campus power cut that is needed for construction of the new athletic center. It should be over by the start of the conference on Tuesday, but we'll have no technology at all available on Monday or Tuesday, including email. Add good beer onto the list and what more do you need?

It is very dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue

Over the past few years, there has been a growing interest in using games as tools in higher education in a variety of topics. Much of the hype has gone either to virtual worlds built in Second life or massive simulations such as Mike Wesch's world simulation project for his introductory sociology courses. But these both have the same problem- the student is playing a game that someone else designed- it's either structured into the course itself with rules created by the professor or has a barrier to entry so high that only specialists can create content within the system.

So why not go back to the future? For any of us old farts who grew up typing "Go north" or "Oil door" into a text adventure, a couple of lines of text followed by a > prompt doesn't seem unusual, and for the digital natives of today it has a retro feel, much like seeing an old Caddie with shark-like tail fins. It turns out that you can create a text adventure without a huge investment in programming time using the latest version of the Inform programming environment.

Inform uses a very natural language-like syntax, so a typical set of instructions might look like

The Office is a room. The description is "An office, complete with peppy motivational posters on the walls, a couple of family photos and an aging PC."
The hallway is east of the Office. The description is "A Hallway. What more do you need to know?"
The computer is in the Office. It is fixed in place. Instead of using the computer, say "You need to know the password first"

You've now created two rooms that you move between and an object that you can (sort of) interact with. While you can get a lot more complicated if you want (making a fully functional computer takes some work) the base syntax for creating a world, adding descriptions and simple triggers shouldn't be beyond anyone, even non-programmers. This means that ordinary students can build a world of their own and let people play in it without the overhead (and expense- Inform is free) that you would need for more "sophisticated" tools.

Here at GBurg, Chris Fee in the English department is using Inform in his courses on medieval literature to have students build areas that other students can explore. In many ways, it's similar to an essay- they have to build a fictional narrative, characters and then flesh them out, but they have the additional capability to lead people to try various actions within the story to see what happens, all the while the author has to better their own understanding of the area they are developing to cover strange or unusual actions by their players. The project is ongoing - the first class to develop these is just now finishing up and the adventures will be passed down to a 200-level course next year for them to explore, so we'll see how this goes, but as an educational tool I think it shows a great deal of possibility- cheap to use, easy to learn and able to leverage the "play" aspect that is so effective in using games to teach people.

Hidden in plain sight

Living in Gettysburg, you can't get away from the history of the town. I live less than a mile from the battlefield, which sounds interesting until you realize that the only places not less than a mile away are sitting on the battlefield itself. The battlefield itself is covered in monuments, markers, statues and of course tons and tons of cannon pointing everywhere. One of the most interesting things about all the displays isn't obvious to folks who don't know much about artillery. For example, check the two pictures to the left



If you ask people what the differences between the weapons are, most would probably just comment that the one on the bottom is green, yet the two cannon are vastly different.

The green cannon is a 12 pound Napoleon, a very popular weapon on the battlefield- about 40% of the total cannon on both sides were variants of this design. The gun tubes were made of bronze (thus the green patina) smooth inside and they were loaded by ramming powder, wadding and shot into the muzzle (front) of the cannon. With some luck you could hit a target a mile away with one of these, but they were more effective at close range firing canister rounds - effectively big shotgun shells- into massed infantry.

The weapon on the top is a 2.75 in Whitworth Breechloading Rifle. Only two of these were at the battle, both owned by the South who used them to shell Union positions south of the town from a hill to the north of Gettysburg. The gun barrel was rifled, allowing for much greater range, easily twice that of the Napoleon. It was loaded from the rear (breech) rather than the front, and the barrel was made from iron and steel. Virtually all modern artillery pieces follow this design- the Napoleon was a technological dead end, and continuing increases in range, accuracy and fire rate made modern artillery the most effective killer in warfare until the modern bomber came along.

So what all does this have to do with educational technology? Reading through the 2008 Horizon report from EDUCAUSE I'm struck by how the "transformative" future technologies have been hidden in plain sight much like the differences in the Civil War cannon. Their first key emerging technology is grassroots video. Nothing here appears new at all- students have been using cameras to make short films and videos for decades. Yet the incredible price drops in digital cameras and camcorders coupled with the explosive growth in hard disk capacity and improvements in online streaming technology have suddenly changed the entire landscape from one where a few film studies students could spend semesters learning the technology and then slowly putting together a five minute film to one where virtually any student can grab a camera, shoot hours of footage, slap it together in an easy to use editor and share it with anyone on the internet in a few hours. Nothing really looks all that different at first, but the underlying technology is so different and so much more efficient that it's not really the same after all.

The same is true with things like collaboration webs and mobile broadband. Nothing here is new at all- internet based editable documents have been around forever and viewing web sites on a mobile phone is nothing really new. Yet again the base technology is changing enough that suddenly what was tricky to set up or annoying to use isn't anymore. I left my laptop at home at a recent conference and brought only my phone, and I didn't really miss it- I was able to send mail, view web sites and even read EDUCAUSE reports on it. So long as I didn't mind the web being 320x240, it was fine.

The longer range stuff such as data mashups isn't quite there yet for non-specialists (I've developed custom Google Maps apps, but it's still only for the truly geeky), but it's obviously coming and once the technological barrier to entry drops things will change just as fast- technologies that don't really appear any different from what was there before will suddenly take over.

Or will they? I have to think back to the cannon and remember that modern tanks have ditched the rifled cannon in favor of smoothbores. Everything old is new again...

Opening up Flash

Adobe is finally realizing that Flash as a universal platform will be of more value to them than Flash as a revenue source. This isn't a full release of everything, but making the file specs and porting layers open and removing the licensing from the players it's a huge step to getting Flash onto every system out there. Programming purists may scoff at Flash and Actionscript, but for rapidly developing rich animated content it's the best tool out there.

There's still a major issue though: Flash video (such as Youtube) uses On2 codecs which are nowhere near as open, so some of these platforms may end up with all the Flash goodness without the site that pushed Flash into near-total ubiquity. Given the popularity of student created videos in classes (and for skateboarding crash videos outside of class) I'm not sure if this is going to be as big a deal as it might be for both Adobe and the creative community